Back In My Day

No one is required to get insurance (or pay the penalty) if the lowest cost of a silver plan on the exchange is more than about 9.7% of his or her salary. So, assuming you are single and are making between $16000 and $40,000 in a state that did not expand Medicaid, in that case Obamacare is neutral for you-- not helping you get insurance, but not having a negative effect either, as you are now no worse or better off than you were before it when you had no insurance (although you are better off future-potential-wise-- in the event you can eventually afford it, you cannot be denied insurance or charged more because of a pre-existing condition). basically, you are falling into the gap that has not been fixed because of rightwing obstruction in Congress (and also at a state level in states which did not expand Medicaid).

Correction, just noticed you seem to have literally meant you make "too much for subsidy" (misread the quotes as a sarcasm about it all), so that places you income in the $40k and up range.

Sounds like you were basically screwed over by your employer-- if you are not eligible for subsidies and make less than $40k, then the cost for the second lowest Silver plan on the exchange for your state has to be less than about $330. Employers can get plans close to that very easily. If not offering insurance and above the equivalent of 50 fulltime employees, your employer will pay a $2000 fine per employee. If instead they had offered plans and put that $2000 toward it, you could have gotten that plan for about $40 a week/$160 a month, and that likely would have saved you much more than that from what you have stated about your medical bills.

There is no mandate for "Mom and Pop's", only business with 50+ full time employees or the equivalent have to pay the penalty, and the increases in premiums have been actually less than in the decade before (1999-2008). So if your employer is a "mom and pop" and they claim they dropped the companywide insurance plan because of the ACA, well, sorry but they lied just to keep the the amount that they were putting in in the years before. Small company plans went up LESS after ACA started coming into effect than in the years (again, 1999-2008 were much higher in annual increases) before I am self-employed in retail sales online, and I am one of the rare people you will meet online who actually looks at the data and knows the law.

The math does not add up for the employer-- if they were subsidizing your insurance before and not now, then that is a pay cut they gave you unless they gave you the amount they were paying toward your insurance before. The penalty for large employers ( defined as those with more than the equivalent of 50 full time employers) is $2000 I believe, thus if they were paying MORE than that before ACA toward your insurance then they have kept the difference. If they were paying that much, they should pay that much still and stil have insurance available for employers to buy. If they were paying les than that they stil have to pay the $2000 as a penalty, so they should have kept insurance available for employees. The costs of plans is only going up 5% on average per year under ACA, it was going up about 7-9% a year in the decade before ACA.
In short-- a lot of employers played the "blame ACA" card to cut their insurance costs (down to the $2000 per employee penalty), hopefully yours was not one that did (because employers that did that , well, suck).